mouseman

I haven't been around horses a lot, so take this with a grain of salt. I agree with the longer mane. I'd also vote for a slightly thinner neck near the base / shoulders. Can you post the rotoscope picture, too?

I kind of like the large nose. It could use some tweaks. But most people try to model people with ideal proportions (or exaggerated proportions, ahem); I think it's refreshing to see more realistic people being modelled. One suggestion, maybe or maybe not helpful ... generally, there is a line or crease from the side of the nose to the far corners of the mouth. You seem to achieve this effect by having diagonal corners of 4-sided patches lower than the opposite diagonals; the patch effectively gets folded diagonally. This looks okay for a still character, but when you want to create a smile pose for the character, the lines should become sharper than what you can get by this technique.

I will be posting it for the Mini Movie Contest #4, just a few weeks away. I have a project page for friends and family, but I couldn't afford the bandwidth to tell everyone where it's at.

Here is some useful information on the design of stairs. The house is fantastic.

Choreography length: 1:34:00 Play range: 00:00:00 to 01:34:00 Options: 30 fps It's funny, the second the render window comes up, the "Frames Rendered" and the "Frames Left" add up to 2400. If I create a new choreography of length 01:34:00, it goes to 2820. Hmmm ... Aha! Choreography -> Shortcut to Camera1, properties Output Options -> Range -> End = 1:20:00 Looks like that was it! I changed it to 1:34:00 and all was well in the world. Thanks for the ideas!

It is 30 frames. I've never used 24.

I am working on an animation for the Mini-Movie Contest. I have a single choreography. It's length was about 01:18:00 (almost 80 seconds) for the longest time. Then I added another 15 or so seconds, so it's length is 01:34:00 (94 seconds). Now when I go to render the choreography, I enter 01:34:00 for the end of the range, then click render. Immediately I notice that the start and end frames add up to 2400. Divide by 30 for frames/second, and I get only 80 seconds. I am unable to figure out how to render the last 14 seconds into the movie. I've switched it between QuickTime and AVI, with no improvement. Is this something I'm doing wrong, or something that should be reported?

I'm assuming you are in agreement that it is inherently problematic to use tilting (I'm not sure that's the best word for it, though) and rotation to control bending and rotation, as they interact unappetizingly. Your setup certainly looks cleaner. Of course it will be incompatible with the AM2001 rig, but I think we can agree that that rig is broken for the fingers, anyways. In your model, the bones for the knuckles look the same as the 2001 rig, so the difference must be in the control bone, and it looks like there is an added NULL bone. Care to give a summary of how you did it? (And is anyone from Hash interested in creating a new version of the AM rig to fix this for the next release?)

Life has been busy, but I finally had time to look into this more. It looks like whenever you tilt a bone from 0 degrees in one frame to 90 degrees a second or so later in the timeline, it does so smoothly. Also, if you rotate a bone from 0 degrees to 90 degrees, that works well, too. However, if you both tilt and rotate a bone, the tilting and rotating interact. The tilting is no longer smooth. The attached project demonstrates this phenomena. I believe this means either: 1. It is a huge mistake for the AM2001 rig to use a single bone for both tilting the fingers and using the side effect of rotation to key other bones to rotate, since tilting and rotation affect each other in undesirable ways. 2. There may be some setting to tell the finger bone to always apply the tilting first, then the bone rotation. Anyone have opinions on this? Tilt_Rotate.prj

In looking at the relationships, I'm very confused. When I open "Left Hand Clench Relationships" / "Relationship1", I see bones with channels under them. There seems to be a key in frame 0 and in frame 3000 (SMPTE 01:40:00, which is 100 minutes). If I move the time indicator in the timeline, I do not see the fingers move in the "Relationship1" window that I've opened. I can't figure out how to edit things. None of this sounds like the manual page: http://www.hash.com/htmlHelp/v11.1/CustomH...lationships.htm The basic relationships for the curving of the fingers in another thing I'm looking into. Under "Setup Relationships" -> "Basic Setup Relationships" -> "Relationship1", I see constraints. "Left Middle F 1" has an "Orient Like ..|Left Middle Finger". This shows a key in frame 0 and in frame 3000. What happened to 0 to 100? I notice when I create a blank action, then enable "Show Fingers", then rotate the fingers individually, that I get decent behavior. So I have hope that if I can figure out how to modify the relationships I might be able to get good finger movement. But the interface for modifying the "Left Hand Clench" (and Right Hand Clench) relationships confuses me. Am I totally overlooking something? Have I RTFMed in all the wrong places? Or is the manual lacking? Or do I have something configured wrong? Thanks for any ideas!

I've been looking around the rig, but poses have changed lots since I've last looked at them. Hopefully I'll have more time to poke around this weekend.

You guys are looking at the right problem. Thanks for looking into it. The Kee-Kat hand animation is similar to the behavior I am getting, though the fingers go one way and then the other. My first attempt at modifying the relationships didn't go well, though I wasn't paying close attention to what I was doing. Unfortunately I won't have any time to try the suggestions until Wednesday night. I'll try it then and let you know what I get.

MouseMan, I'm so sorry - Darn it!, could you repost, in my morning stooper I accidentally killed your post. So sorry, Mike Fitz www.3dartz.com

I'd say the words "stand" and "either" are both under expressed given the voicing. Other than that, I think it's incredible.